Legal Gladiator: The Life of Alan Dershowitz

More Praise for Legal Gladiator

Solomon Schmidt’s biography explores the highs and lows of Alan’s life in a gripping narrative. Read this book!

—Greta Van Susteren, eminent news anchor; current host of Newsmax’s The Record

"Alan Dershowitz’s portfolio is unique in the annals of legal history, and Solomon Schmidt has told his life story brilliantly in Legal Gladiator."

—Robert Shapiro, acclaimed criminal defense attorney; co-founder of LegalZoom

Solomon Schmidt has written a captivating story. This is a significant new biography about a significant figure. Do read it.

—Lord Daniel Finkelstein, OBE, former executive editor of The Times; bestselling author

Alan Dershowitz is one of the sharpest, bravest, and most principled legal minds in America. Interviewing him is always a challenge, because you have to be on your A-game, but an enjoyable one.

—Piers Morgan, internationally renowned media personality

A fascinating account about one of the greatest lawyers of our generation. This is a must read.

—Jay Sekulow, famed religious liberties litigator; host of the radio and TV show Sekulow

"Solomon Schmidt has skillfully recounted Alan’s life in Legal Gladiator, and the result is a fascinating, inspiring story."

—Arthur Aidala, noted defense lawyer; host of the radio show The Arthur Aidala Power Hour

Here is the case for Alan Dershowitz . . . This frank but friendly biography is not written by or for lawyers, and it is all the more enjoyable for that reason.

—Geoffrey Robertson, prominent human rights lawyer; author of bestseller Rather His Own Man

A lively portrait of America’s most famous lawyer, revealing the funny and endearing man behind the legal theories, the celebrity clients, and the colorful controversies.

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; bestselling author

Copyright © 2024 by Solomon Schmidt

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-8064-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5107-8065-1

Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan

Cover photograph by Getty Images

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Harvey Silverglate—a kind man, a hard worker, and a brilliant lawyer. Harvey has been a dear friend and supporter to me in my work, and without him, this project on Professor Dershowitz would not have been possible.

To my mom, Lisa, who taught me how to read, who loved and watched out for me when I was most vulnerable, and who helped ground me in the principles I hold today.

And to my dad, Mike, a lion of a father and a friend, who gave me the idea of writing my first book and who has unendingly supported, helped, and encouraged me in every single aspect of my work.

In nomine Jesu.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niem.ller, philosopher

In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience—the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men—each man must decide for himself the course he will follow.

—John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage

CONTENTS

Prologue

PART ONE: RISE

A World of Struggles

Coming into His Own

Big Feet

Boy Professor

Next Year in Jerusalem!

For Me but Not for Thee

On the Threshold

PART TWO: GLORY DAYS

Outnumbered

Help Wanted

Trails of Deceit

David and Goliath

PART THREE: INTO THE WILDERNESS

To the Dark Side

Taking the Stand

Epilogue

Appendix: Human Alan

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Plates

PROLOGUE

It’s disgusting! Your whole enclave—it’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!

It was a summer day in 2021, and Alan Dershowitz found himself in the Chilmark General Store on Martha’s Vineyard being shouted at by someone he had once regarded as a friend.

Over the previous twenty-five years, Dershowitz and comedian Larry David had formed a special relationship. On the Vineyard, they played poker and volleyball often and shared lively conversations on the porch of the General Store. David used Dershowitz’s home gym, and the two periodically had dinner together with their wives. On top of this, David had once spoken at an event honoring Dershowitz’s work on behalf of human rights, and Dershowitz had made a phone call to help one of David’s children get into college.

Then came the era of Trump. Dershowitz frequently advocated for Trump’s civil liberties, advised his Middle East team, and represented him on the floor of the Senate during Trump’s first impeachment trial. In the process, he formed close ties within conservative circles.

It was all too much for many in the liberal community, including Larry David, who slowly cooled in his interactions with Dershowitz. When he saw Dershowitz in the Chilmark General Store in August 2021, he turned around to leave the store.

We can still talk, Larry, Dershowitz called after him.

No. No. We really can’t, said David, turning around in a rage. I saw you. I saw you with your arm around Pompeo! He was referring to a publicized visit Dershowitz had made to the White House in 2020, during which Trump had unveiled a plan for peace in the Middle East and Dershowitz had been spotted patting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the back.

He’s my former student, Dershowitz said to David. I greet all of my former students that way. I can’t greet my former students?

It’s disgusting, retorted David, voice raised, veins bulging, and face reddening. Your whole enclave—it’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!

Alan Dershowitz is to the law what Churchill is to politics, what Ali is to sports, what Shakespeare is to literature, and what Einstein is to science. He is arguably the most iconic lawyer in American history.

Over a fifty-year career at Harvard, Dershowitz taught around ten thousand students, and in addition to his signature course Introduction to Criminal Law, he offered nearly twenty different courses over the years. As a scholar and author, he has written almost sixty books, which have sold over one million copies in dozens of foreign languages. As a speaker and debater, he has been heard in person by nearly two million people in venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, the Kremlin, Madison Square Garden, the French Assembly, the House of Lords, the Knesset, and the US Senate. As a ubiquitous commentator in the media for sixty years, he has appeared thousands of times on media outlets like Firing Line with William Buckley, Larry King Live, Geraldo Rivera, The Record with Greta Van Susteren, Oprah, Sean Hannity, The View, and many others. As a Zionist, he has known (and in various cases advised) Israeli prime ministers Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu. And finally, as a lawyer, he has litigated upward of three hundred cases, including high-profile murder and rape cases, pro bono efforts on behalf of foreign dissidents, and the impeachment proceedings of two US presidents.

Since his childhood, Dershowitz has always been a lightning rod for controversy. But who could have predicted that his eighth decade would bring the most vehement controversies of his life on account of a mysterious financier named Jeffrey Epstein and a businessman and TV host named Donald Trump? Who could have foreseen that Dershowitz would be panned by members of a liberal community that once widely admired him?

What I appreciated from Alan was the risk he took by choosing a side that most of the people my wife and I know opposed, says Dershowitz’s friend Geraldo Rivera. As became apparent with the Russia collusion hoax, sometimes the right wing is right. Trump did not deserve to be convicted in that impeachment trial. Alan did the right thing. He was true to his profession.

I was not surprised by Alan’s decision to represent President Trump, says Justice Stephen Breyer, who has known Dershowitz since the 1960s. He determined things on principle and followed through with his decisions. He wanted everybody to be represented, including people who may themselves be terrible. I think that’s a good thing for the bar and the bench—for everybody—because those people are entitled to it.

People would impugn Alan and say he did it for notoriety or some other non-noble purpose, but I truly believe he’s a crusader through and through for the rights of people who are hated, notes Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU and a student of Dershowitz’s in the 1970s. I don’t think he courted the adverse publicity and shunning he was subjected to.

I feel like people who are disappointed don’t understand what a criminal defense lawyer does, comments Megyn Kelly, who has often invited Dershowitz onto her shows. "It’s not an endorsement of the client or their misdeeds for someone to represent them. When you’re in criminal defense, you’re going to be representing some very bad people. That’s the nature of the job. People need to grow up.

I was probably a little bit more to the right than Alan was, and occasionally, I’d disagree with him on something political, Kelly continues. But I can say that Alan was incredibly principled. In the day and age in which he defended Trump, when everybody was selling out for their partisan leanings, few people stood in the small circle that is their own objective values. Alan did, and that is incredibly rare, sadly.

I believe him when he said that he wasn’t defending Donald Trump’s ideology, says Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who sparred with Dershowitz in the prestigious Munk Debates in Toronto after breaking the Edward Snowden story in 2013. I believe he was defending principles and not Trump’s ideology. I think that’s always a difficult thing to do, and it’s a part of Alan I find admirable.

Having talked with Alan about it, I don’t think he did it for any ulterior motive, for attention or anything like that, says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a friend of Dershowitz’s from Martha’s Vineyard. Even though I think he felt that Trump was not good for our country, he honestly believed that the law was being used against Trump in ways that were not good for our country. It was kind of like letting the Nazis march through Skokie—stand up for the principle even though the people that you’re protecting are reprehensible people.

It certainly didn’t surprise me that Alan took a legal position that was dramatically opposed to his personal political beliefs, comments Robert Shapiro, who worked with Dershowitz on the O. J. Simpson case. Alan was a true believer in the Constitution. It wouldn’t have surprised me any more than seeing the ACLU take a position that was against my social and moral compass. I will say this, though: I didn’t expect that Alan Dershowitz would get involved in a political controversy. After thinking about it and discussing it with him, however, there was no reason why a constitutional scholar could not take positions that were different from what his supporters would believe he’d subscribe to.

Of all the people I’ve known for decades, Alan remained absolutely consistent, says civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, who was a student in Dershowitz’s first-ever class at Harvard in 1964. He would represent the most despicable human beings, which is what criminal defense lawyers do. He was not afraid to take controversial cases and risks, whatever that entailed.

Dershowitz’s momentous life story begins in a Depression-hit Jewish community in Brooklyn, while far away in Europe the clouds of an impending Holocaust were looming.

PART ONE

RISE

A WORLD OF STRUGGLES

September 1938 found Harry and Claire Dershowitz, two Orthodox Jews living in Brooklyn, with a baby boy. Per Jewish custom, they gave him a Hebrew name, Avraham Mordecai, from which they derived an American name: Allen Morton. In time, Avraham Mordecai Dershowitz became known as Avi to family and close friends.

Dershowitz’s father, Harry, worked six days a week to provide for his family, selling men’s clothing in a dry goods store in Manhattan—resting only on the Sabbath. After closing his shop each night, Harry took multiple trains from the wealthier hub of Manhattan across the Williamsburg Bridge to his home in Brooklyn, where an ever-growing number of Jewish refugees were settling from Europe.

Over the last several years in Germany, Adolf Hitler’s government had enacted a series of laws which steadily took away the rights of Jewish citizens, forbidding them from serving in the military, teaching at or attending public schools, marrying or having sex with non-Jews, or practicing law. During this time, Aaron Dershowitz gathered his wife and two children in their spacious apartment in Czechoslovakia. Aaron, a successful businessman and a cousin of Harry Dershowitz, had listened to radio reports in March that announced Hitler’s takeover of Austria, and in his home city of Brno, antiaircraft guns were installed on the roofs of buildings. Aaron was warned by his aging father: This guy Hitler is different from all the others. Get out.

His friends, however, sought to calm him down. Come on! Hitler’s just another anti-Semite, one said. We’ve gone through the tsars, we’ve gone through everything else. We’ll manage. Aaron decided to listen to his father and told his family, Europe is no longer a place for the Jews. He made plans to follow his cousins to America.

Under the cover of night, on December 31, 1938, the Dershowitzes left Czechoslovakia and crossed the border into Poland, where they eventually boarded a tourist ship and reached America on February 7 the following year. Thirty-six days later, Hitler’s army invaded Czechoslovakia. For Aaron’s friends and family members who had decided to stay and trust that this leader was just another anti-Semite, it was too late to get out. And of course, Aaron’s son Zvi recalled eight decades later, they didn’t make it.

When Aaron Dershowitz and his family arrived in the goldene medina, a Yiddish term for the United States meaning the golden country, they were welcomed by a bespectacled and cigar-smoking man named Louis, Avi Dershowitz’s paternal grandfather. Professionally, Louis was a printer and a paper salesman, who made a meager income to provide for his wife, Ida, and their children. Privately, though, he had taken upon himself the role of protector of the family. News had drifted to his community of the violence and discrimination against European Jews of all different classes and nationalities. Louis wanted to help as many Dershowitzes as possible to emigrate; however, this was a difficult time to find refuge in America. Quotas had been put in place by the government, limiting the number of Jewish immigrants, and on top of this, less than 5 percent of the American public wanted to allow Jewish refugees to enter the country.

This did not stop Louis. For almost ten years leading up to World War II, he contacted relatives in Poland and Czechoslovakia who needed aid, including Aaron Dershowitz’s family. He arranged meetings with wealthy relatives in the United States, including one who owned a theater chain in New York, to secure financial backing for affidavits which certified that an immigrant would not become a nuisance to the country. Louis also capitalized on the US government’s favoritism toward immigrants of a religious or academic background. He sent for a particular male relative in Europe to relocate with his family to America and serve as a rabbi for his father Zecharia’s shtieble, a sort of family synagogue located in the basement of his home in Williamsburg. After a couple of weeks, the new rabbi was fired, and another relative was brought over from Europe to fill the role. This legal masquerade was repeated several times, and through all his efforts, Louis saved twenty-nine family members from the coming Holocaust.

Devotion to family was a trait Louis passed on to his second son, Harry, a warm-hearted, quiet, yet tough man who engaged in physical fights with bullies who shouted anti-Jewish obscenities to his brothers. Harry was extremely devoted to my parents, recalled his youngest brother, Zecharia. He was the brother who, after my father died, made it his business to visit my mother most often. Born in 1909, Harry spent the first year of his life in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan and lived in high-rise, slum-like conditions before the family packed up and crossed the East River to the burgeoning Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn. After several years of struggling through both secular and religious schooling, Harry dropped out of high school and went into business, partnering with two of his uncles to open a dry goods store and managing to earn a yearly income of $7,500.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Naftuli Ringel—Avi Dershowitz’s maternal grandfather—was a Jewish peasant living in the city of Przemyśl in Galicia, a region which extended from present-day Krakow, Poland, to Lviv, Ukraine. Unwilling to kill a person even in battle, Naftuli hoped to avoid conscription into the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and decided to join a wave of Polish immigrants making the journey to America. In 1907, he temporarily left his wife, Blima, and three children in the hopes of starting a new life in the goldene medina. After his arrival, he worked as a peddler in Manhattan, scraping together the funds necessary to bring his family over. A few years later, Blima sailed with the young ones across the Atlantic Ocean.

Soon thereafter, in July 1913, she gave birth to a baby girl named Claire. Like her future husband, she for a time grew up in crowded housing developments on the Lower East Side, but moved to Williamsburg around 1923.

Unlike her future husband, Claire Ringel excelled academically. She graduated from high school at the top of her class at fifteen years old, and in 1929, she enrolled at City College in New York, called the Jewish Harvard. Brilliant, inquisitive, and articulate, she was the first of the Ringels ever to attend college, but her hopes of eventually becoming a schoolteacher were cut short after only a month by the stock market crash. Her father, Naftuli, needed additional income to support their family, and Claire dropped out of college to take a job as a bookkeeper, which became a lifelong career.

Harry and Claire’s families knew each other from the Williamsburg community, and during the slump of the Great Depression, they met and fell in love. They were married on January 9, 1937, and less than two years later, Claire gave birth to Avraham Mordecai Dershowitz in a Williamsburg hospital. As was customary among Galician Jews, his Hebrew name was the first name of Naftuli’s father, the patriarch of the Ringel family. On the eighth day of his life, he was circumcised, physically signifying his place in the four-thousand-year-old Jewish community.

Dershowitz’s first years were spent in the ground floor of a house at 193 Hewes St. in Williamsburg, and as a child, he played with his cousin Zvi, who had recently escaped Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Harry and Claire were intent on raising their son in the traditions of Orthodox Judaism, which their families had followed for generations. One of the core observances was the regular wearing of a yarmulke, which denotes the lowliness of man before the holiness of Jehovah. Once, when Avi was three, his parents took him shopping for a pair of tall leather shoes, and as they were waiting to cross a street in Brooklyn, the maverick toddler decided to go ahead on his own. In the process, an eighteen-wheeler ran over his foot and only missed crushing him entirely when Harry pulled him to safety. Avi’s leather boots had saved his foot from being flattened, but the truck’s wheel had broken some of his bones. Harry and Claire took him to a nearby Catholic hospital, where he was to spend the night after being examined. Later that evening, Claire received a call from the hospital, and the nurse informed her, Your son wants to go to Florida.

He’s never even heard of Florida, responded Claire, who went to the hospital to investigate. There was her three-year-old son in front of his meal shouting, Miami!! Claire proceeded to explain to the nurse that Avi was saying, My yami!—meaning his yarmulke, without which he could not begin his meal.

Around this time, Dershowitz’s grandfather Naftuli Ringel died and was buried with a small bag of sand he had gathered in Palestine. He left his wife Blima a widow, and she was unable to afford the rent for her apartment in the neighborhood of Borough Park. Harry Dershowitz decided to move his family into Blima’s apartment and take care of the rent for his mother-in-law. While he and Claire plodded on with their jobs as salesman and bookkeeper, on May 5, 1942, they welcomed a second son to their family. Naftuli Zeaf (Americanized to Nathan Zeff) was to be Avi’s only sibling and received the nickname Tully from his Hebrew first name. Soon after Nathan’s birth, the Dershowitzes moved into an apartment complex on the corner of 14th Avenue and 53rd Street. They spent the war years living in this two-bedroom apartment for thirty-five dollars a month.

The core neighborhood of Borough Park was less than one square mile and contained a population of 100,000 Jews, along with communities of Italians and Irish. Although it was filled with houses and shops, it was a well-kept and clean area of Brooklyn. In fact, the Dershowitzes were able to buy fresh corn and chickens on farmland just a few blocks from home. Borough Park’s residents tended to be modern (liberal) in their religious views.

Modern Orthodox Jews like Harry and Claire allowed their children to dress in American clothes, rather than black coats and prayer shawls of the ultra-Orthodox Hasidim sect. Harry and Claire also made sure Avi spoke clear English in addition to Yiddish, the language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. My family wanted us to be as American as possible, recalls Dershowitz. Louis Dershowitz told his grandson to be a good American because America was a wonderful country for the Jews.

When he departed for a new life in America, Dershowitz’s great-grandfather Zecharia had left behind seven siblings in his hometown of Pilzno in present-day Poland. Although his son Louis rescued a number of these relatives before World War II broke out, he could not save them all. After the fall of western Poland, Pilzno came into German hands, and the members of the Dershowitzes’ extended family in the area were ordered to wear a yellow-and-black cloth in the shape of the Star of David, a symbol that derived from the shields used by King David’s army in biblical times. Between 1939 and the summer of 1942, sporadic attacks were carried out in Pilzno, but in July 1942, most of the Jews were rounded up and disappeared to concentration camps. Those who did not suffer this fate, such as the family of Benjamin Dershowitz, were killed in late 1944 when an order arrived to shoot the remaining Jews in the town.

Dershowitz’s maternal family met the same end. Despite an armed stand against the Nazis’ arrival, two of Naftuli Ringel’s three siblings, in addition to many nieces, nephews, and cousins, were shot in 1942 along with their fellow 17,000 Jews in Przemyśl. Out of the many Ringels who had lived in the city, a handful survived—and only because they had fled while there was still time.

By the spring of 1945, approximately six million Jews had been killed across Europe, and the Allied armies were preparing for the final assault on Hitler’s Berlin. Dershowitz and his father listened to news updates about the war on their small white radio. Although they would not learn the full extent of the genocide until after World War II, the Borough Park community knew that relatives were disappearing in Europe. Letters would suddenly stop arriving from family members they had corresponded with frequently. Harry told his son that the rate at which the Allies conquered Nazi land would determine how many of their family members would stay alive. Dershowitz helped his father move thumbtacks on a map of Europe to indicate the positions of both Dwight Eisenhower’s and Georgy Zhukov’s forces advancing on Berlin.

Once the conflict at last came to a close in August that same year, evidence of the atrocities of the Holocaust began to seep into Dershowitz’s young life. As more immigrants arrived, he occasionally noticed classmates and fellow synagogue attendees with numbers tattooed onto their wrists. One day, Dershowitz’s friend Barry Zimmerman overheard his mother and grandfather sitting in their kitchen crying over reports of killed relatives. It was very common, he says.

But an aura of silence surrounded the Holocaust among the community until many years later. Everyone knew about the Holocaust. It wasn’t discussed in our community, though, said Dershowitz as an adult. It just was not talked about. And life went on.

Along with most of Borough Park, Dershowitz and his family revered the Democratic leaders who had led them through World War II. Mayor LaGuardia spoke fluent Yiddish, and his solidarity with Jewish constituents and anti-Nazi stances endeared him to the community. President Roosevelt’s surname was affectionately Judaized to Rosenfelt by Dershowitz’s Grandma Ringel in part because of his appointing Ashkenazi justice Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court.

Dershowitz and his family were thoroughly liberal in their political views. We supported desegregation, opposed capital punishment, and contributed to the ACLU and NAACP, stated Dershowitz later in life. When Dershowitz stopped by to visit his close friend Carl Meshenberg, Carl’s father, a left-leaning immigrant, was always talking politics. I didn’t know there was another team, joked Dershowitz’s close friend from Manhattan, Norman Sohn.

Above all, though, after the end of World War II, devotion to Zionism was the highest ideal. The establishment of a nation-state for the Jewish people took on a renewed priority after the Holocaust. The Dershowitzes contributed their part to the Zionist dream by keeping a pushka can in their home next to the telephone. Each time Avi Dershowitz wanted to make a call to a friend, he had to place a nickel through the slit on top of the can. Through an organization called the Jewish National Fund, the money that American Jews deposited into their pushkas went toward buying plots of land in Palestine and aiding poor Jews in the region.

When David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of Israel on May 14, 1948, Dershowitz and the rest of his neighborhood were jubilant. There was dancing in the streets of Borough Park, and at Dershowitz’s elementary school, prayers were raised during school hours for the new Jewish nation. To us, explained Dershowitz, Israel was always in the right, and its Arab enemies were always in the wrong.

Joy turned to apprehension, though, when immediately after Israel’s formation, several Arab countries, including Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Egypt, launched attacks into the new country. As the war raged, in the summer of 1948, Dershowitz attended a Hebrew-speaking camp in the Poconos called Camp Massad (Hebrew for foundation). Due to Israel’s ongoing war, individual bunks were named after kibbutzim in Israel. The Israeli anthem Hatikvah was regularly sung, and during mealtime, news updates on the war were played over the radio.

Dershowitz would later learn that a nineteen-year-old named Noam Chomsky was also at the camp, working as a counselor in a nearby bunk. The elder son of Sephardic Jews in Philadelphia, Chomsky became dedicated to socialism in his teen years. There would have been no way for Dershowitz to know it, but in the ’40s I was a Zionist youth leader, recounted Chomsky, who would not make Dershowitz’s acquaintance until the 1960s. I was closely associated with Zionist groups that opposed a Jewish state (a Zionist position at the time) and sought an Arab-Jewish cooperative commonwealth based on working class cooperation.

The fall of 1948 brought a new school year for Dershowitz, and with it, a set of struggles for the restless boy. After two years at a Yiddish-speaking elementary school called Torahs Emes, Harry and Claire transferred him to a Zionist, Hebrew-speaking school named Etz Chaim (Hebrew for Tree of Life). In the morning, he and his classmates were immersed in Old Testament studies, Jewish Ethics and Literature, and Rituals, which was followed by math, science, American history, English, art, music, gym, Jewish history, Hebrew, and Zionism studies in the afternoon.

From the time he was little, Dershowitz possessed an innate tendency to question and argue. Avi was outspoken and opinionated, said Carl Meshenberg. I used to be a goody-two-shoes, said Dershowitz’s classmate Hal Jacobs. But Avi was always a wise guy.

During the morning religious subjects, the rabbis emphasized to the boys that the Torah was the unquestionable word of God. This did not sit well with Dershowitz, inherently a skeptic when it came to religion. When he was around twelve, he created a bracha (Hebrew: blessing) for skeptics, which was a play off a traditional blessing which stated, "Baruch atah Adonoy—Blessed are Thou, Adonai. Baruch atah I deny, read Dershowitz’s blessing. Baruch atah I’m not sure, Baruch atah show me why."

I would occasionally ask impertinent questions that got me tossed out of class, mentioned Dershowitz as an adult. I remember upsetting a teacher by asking where Cain’s wife came from, since Adam and Eve had no daughters.

It was not only impertinence that got him into trouble, but at times plain old mischief. This ranged from shooting an occasional spitball to one episode when he and Carl terrorized their sixth-grade teacher Rabbi Oretsky, who had survived air raids and the Holocaust, by mimicking the sounds of a falling bomb and jumping out suddenly to frighten him. Barry Zimmerman recalled that when Dershowitz could not fill his time with pranks, he would hide comic books inside his thick religious textbooks and detach while the teacher droned on. We were real jerks, said Dershowitz.

At times, Dershowitz reaped the rewards of his misbehavior. During first and second grade, Rabbi Schwartz routinely made him pull down his pants around his knees, lie face-down on the teacher’s desk, and embrace the boom, boom, boom of the pedagogue’s paddle.

A sixth grade report card showed that Dershowitz achieved Ds in Effort, Conduct, and Respects the Rights of Others, and his principal, Rabbi Shulman, reported to Harry and Claire: Avi’s mind is dirty; he refuses to show respect to his rabbis. While Dershowitz’s mind may have been corrupted, it was obviously functioning properly. That same year, Dershowitz and his classmates were administered IQ tests to determine whether they would be in Class A, B, or C the following year. Dershowitz secured one of the highest grades possible, but his then-principal suspected he had cheated.

In the spring of 1951, Dershowitz graduated Etz Chaim, and as the fall approached, he prepared to not only turn thirteen—the age at which a Jewish male is considered a man—but also to begin the formative years of high school (in those days there was no middle school). Handwritten notes from Dershowitz’s final Etz Chaim yearbook included: Dear Avi, If you want to be successful, put your shoulder to the wheel. Do not procrastinate. Do not depend upon others from his father and the following ditty from his classmate Josh Weisberger: All the guys who love you, all love you swell, but the guys who hate you, can go to hell!

Dershowitz had desperately wanted to follow his friends Bernie Beck and Hal Jacobs to the nearby elite Flatbush Yeshiva High School, but horrific grades barred his admittance, along with an apprehensive principal who had learned of Dershowitz’s less-than-stellar performance in elementary school. He was forced to go to the less-prestigious Yeshiva University High School.

That September, Dershowitz had his bar mitzvah ceremony. During the traditional ceremony, a young Jewish man is required to read a portion of the Torah in its original language, made difficult because the written text contains no vowels or dots over letters. One week after his thirteenth birthday, Dershowitz stood on the raised platform of the Young Israel Synagogue, while his rabbi, Samuel Mirsky, and many of his family and friends looked on. The portion of Scripture he was assigned happened to be a classic verse from Deuteronomy about justice and the rule of law. "Tzedek, tzedek, tirdoff—Justice, justice shall you pursue," rang out the words as Dershowitz chanted with proper intonation and pronunciation. He delivered a perfect performance.

The following month, Dershowitz and his community gathered for another coming-of-age ceremony for his classmate Jerry Blau, a shy but respectful student. He delivered a terrible performance, stumbling and stuttering through his Torah portion and speech. When he had finished, Rabbi Mirsky looked at the congregation and declared, Sometimes there are boys who read perfectly from the Torah, but we do not judge them as well as boys who live a deeply religious life and who are well behaved. Dershowitz had just been indirectly called out in front of his entire Borough Park community. He and his father later agreed that the rabbi’s actions were unfair at the least, and Dershowitz would comment over sixty years later: Even when I did something perfectly, they would find some way to turn my success against me.

The 1950s was the age of the nuclear family, and Dershowitz’s was no exception. Several years back, Harry and Claire had purchased a three-story brick house on 48th Street in Borough Park for seven thousand dollars. Knowing their relatives needed a place to live, they let Harry’s cousin Buddy and his bride, Selma, move into the basement, while Claire’s brother Hedgy moved into the top floor with his wife, Muriel, and their son, Norman. Harry and Claire lived on the first floor, which contained one bathroom, sitting room, and foyer, along with a bedroom for the parents and a room to be shared by Avi and his brother. The house was nearly bereft of artwork and books, excluding a few basic publications located in a case in the sitting room: Hebrew and English Old Testaments, some Reader’s Digest condensed titles, and a two-volume, yellow-covered dictionary Avi frequently perused.

On Friday nights, the Dershowitzes gathered in the foyer of 1558 48th Street for the weekly Sabbath dinner. Grandma Ringel always attended, and other family members and friends occasionally joined in. A hearty meal of chicken soup, gefilte fish, flank steak, and dessert was followed by religious songs. There was a lot of singing, remembers Norman Sohn. Avi’s home was beautiful on the Sabbath.

Conversation flowed around the table. My father . . . always encouraged dialogue and debate, recalls Dershowitz. He rarely injected himself into the conversation, except to ask ‘Is it fair?’ or ‘How would that help the underdog?’

He was the second oldest of many siblings, Dershowitz continues. His older brother, Jack, was sickly and unable to defend himself. My father was strong, and so he became the guy who defended his family and Jews in Williamsburg when they were attacked. He even bought me boxing gloves when I was very young. He always lectured me about defending the underdog, including not just Jews, but also African Americans, who were some of his best customers. My father was always telling me: don’t be a bully, fight against people who are stronger than you.

If my mother had the opportunity, she would have been Ruth Bader Ginsburg, says Dershowitz.

Claire was intelligent and outspoken. She was very, very intellectually superior and expressed her opinions forcefully and often, recalls Hal Jacobs. Mrs. Dershowitz forced us—and I’m sure she forced Alan all the time—to think things through, reports Bernie Beck. ‘Why do you say that—what’s your motive?’ she’d say. ‘What about other things that might affect it? Are you letting your emotions affect it?’ She was just wonderful that way. She was a very inquisitive person—always challenging you. If you said it was a hot day out, she’d say, ‘Compared to what?’

Frequently, Claire had to travel to Yeshiva University High School to serve as Avi’s defense attorney before the school principal. They wanted to throw him out many, many times, explains Avi’s cousin Norman Ringel, who ranked Avi third on an unofficial list of most-pigheaded family members, behind only Claire Dershowitz and Norman’s father Hedgy.

My sister Claire must have been called to the principal’s office every other day, says Shirley Ringel. ‘Oh my God, I have to go to the office again,’ she’d say.

Claire was fiercely loyal to both Avi and his younger brother, Nathan, who described Avi as a pain in the ass.

Avi was a wise guy for as long as I can remember, recalls Nathan Dershowitz. He was sufficiently manipulative to get out of punishments that were to be imposed. The brothers shared a messy room and played basketball together using a board that had been nailed into the side of their small white garage. Before Nathan became a teenager, Avi utilized his size advantage to pick on his kid brother and beat him handily in basketball games.

At one point, the brothers had to share their bedroom with a boarder, and a white sheet had to be placed across the middle of the bedroom to divide it. Their parents always needed extra money. Dershowitz remembers desperately wanting Mounds bars, but his family could not afford them since they were ten cents each, whereas regular candies cost a nickel. It was only a real treat when we could get a Mounds bar.

At the beginning of high school, Dershowitz had been placed in the so-called garbage class for misbehaving students with lousy academics. He constantly flunked classes and butted heads with his teachers. [One] time the kid sitting next to me in class lifted an athletic supporter from my gym bag and tossed it at the rabbi, recalls Dershowitz. "Finding my incriminating name tape on the offending item—my mother sewed name tapes onto every item we owned, from handkerchiefs to baseball mitts—the rabbi kicked me out of class. My friend Jake [Greenfield], never one to pass up an opportunity, cautioned the rabbi that I had a ‘gang.’ When I reached the street I told two drunks who were coming down Bedford Avenue that they could get free drinks if they went to the classroom and said, ‘Dersh sent us.’ As soon as they walked in and spoke their lines, Jake piped up, ‘That’s Dersh’s gang, I recognize them.’ The rabbi made a beeline for the door. I was suspended for several weeks and made to sit in the library reading old copies of Life magazine, to the apparent mutual satisfaction of everyone involved, except my mortified parents."

Along with some classmates, Dershowitz formed a so-called gang: the Shields, which was in reference to the iconic Star of David symbol that had adorned the shields of King David’s ancient army. Dershowitz and his friends took pride in rebelling against their rabbis. After school hours, they made a point of wearing chartreuse-and-black uniforms, which had been banned by the rabbis because of their provocative colors.

A group of seven core friends in Brooklyn were Dershowitz’s lifeline through these tumultuous high school years. All told, they were the Big 8: Avi Dershowitz, Barry Zimmerman, Bernie Beck, Carl Meshenberg, Zollie Eisenstadt, Murray Altman, Josh Weisberger, and Hal Jacobs. As a group, the boys were staunch Zionists and liberal in their politics.

Whether it was on a train ride racing over the city as they traveled to their individual schools, over a game of pool at Bernie’s house on Saturday afternoons, or outside the synagogue after sneaking out of a boring sermon from the rabbi, the boys thrived on conversation. We were a very, very verbal, interactive society, recounted Dershowitz. A variety of subjects were discussed: the creation versus evolution debate, American politics, and current events in Israel.

I remember very much that if there was an argument, Avi would say ‘So which side do you want me to argue?’ says Hal Jacobs. And he could argue either side extremely effectively. He had a way of crafting things to always support his viewpoint. One never won an argument against him.

Avi’s brilliance was intimidating, says Bernie. He just knew everything about anything.

Oftentimes, though, the boys simply chatted about the goings-on of life, particularly how their beloved Brooklyn Dodgers were faring. Along with the Dodgers star Jewish pitcher Sandy Koufax—who was like God to us, says Bernie Beck—Dershowitz enthusiastically rooted for Jackie Robinson, who was the only Black player in the MLB when he started his career in 1947. I grew up in a home entirely free of any racial prejudice, Dershowitz says. My parents admired black leaders, and my father had black customers in his store whom he treated as equals.

The subject of girls was also increasingly fascinating to the boys. In those days there was no premarital sex, but Dershowitz liked to be salacious. One time, he brought a copy of the racy novel The Amboy Dukes to Barry’s house and began to read the dirty portions until Mr. Zimmerman peeked his furious face into the room and put a stop to it. Through his high school years, Dershowitz bounced from one girlfriend to another. Physical interactions extended to holding hands while on a cheap date in Greenwood Cemetery, seeing movies at Loew’s Theatre on 46th Street—the border between the Italian and Jewish neighborhoods—and going to the zoo.

Even in the girl department, Dershowitz faced failure. In his freshman year, a school prom was hosted by a panel of girls who graded all the boys on their looks. Category A was the best, and D was the worst. A boy could only pick a girl who had the same ranking. Dershowitz was sweet on Karen, a beautiful blonde, but when he came to the judges’ table, the girls laughed at red-haired, freckled Dershowitz and told him, Don’t you know that Karen is on the A list and you’re on the C list? To add insult to injury, several mothers in Borough Park told their daughters that he was a boy with no future.

By 1953, Dershowitz was approaching his third year of high school, and his relations with his teachers were unendingly difficult. Tough questions and new ideas were suppressed. If your idea is so good, a teacher would say, then the ancient rabbis, who were so much smarter than you, would have come up with it first.

The issue that was very much on my mind at the time, says Dershowitz, was how a person could believe in God after the Holocaust.

At the end of 1953, Dershowitz took a statewide Regents exam in History, the only subject that interested him. He scored an 88—astonishingly high in the minds of his teachers. Mr. Lilker, the history instructor, summoned the teenager to his office. Avi, don’t let it go to your head, he said, trying to prevent Dershowitz from getting his hopes up. You’re a 75 student. You’ve always been a 75 student, and you’ll always be a 75 student.

I believed it and stopped studying, says Dershowitz. I could get 70s without much work, and if that’s who I was anyway, why take time away from activities I enjoyed, such as sports, jokes, girls, and messing around?

As his senior year loomed, Dershowitz’s parents had no commitment of scrimping to send him to college, even if that was something he desired. His potential career options were bleak: according to an employment agency his mother took him to, he could succeed as a salesman, ad executive, or funeral director.

It was in this disheartening time that Dershowitz had an encounter which changed the course of his life.

Yitzchak Greenberg was a respected young member of the Borough Park neighborhood. He had been a well-behaved student and debater through high school and was on his way to Harvard. Everyone knew Yitz, as he was eventually nicknamed. He was smiley, soft-spoken, and extremely intelligent.

The summer of 1954 found both Greenberg and Dershowitz attending a camp in the